Endoscope systems are necessary equipments for diagnosis and treatment of diseases in modern medicine. Existing endoscope systems generally include an endoscope part and a host part, such as the endoscope systems described in the Chinese application with a publication number of CN103917148A. Referring to FIG. 1, the endoscope part generally includes a part 11 which will be inserted into a body cavity, and a mechanical control part 12. The part inserted into the body cavity mainly includes a tubular multi joint mechanical arm 13 (whose specific configuration is not shown in the figures and may be understood referring to the Chinese application with a publication number of CN102341057A, etc) and a camera 14 mounted on the front end of the mechanical arm. Transmission wires (usually four, and not shown in the figures) are inserted into the multi joint mechanical arm. One end of the transmission wires is fixed near the joint, and the other end is connected with the mechanical control part. An operator can control the bending of the multi joint mechanical arm by manipulating the mechanical control part to move the transmission wires in the length direction, such that the camera is able to shoot the region of interesting within the body cavity to obtain videos. The part inserted into the body cavity of the existing endoscope is clad by several layers made from a variety of materials (the specific configuration is not shown in the figures). For example, an inner layer may be a hose made from twisted metal wires, outside of which is clad by polyurethane materials, etc. The video data collected by the camera is transmitted through a dedicated data line 15 which is extended from the mechanical control part and connected to a data interface 21 of the host part 20 through a dedicated data connector 16. The host part generally includes a data processing system 22 and a display 23, etc, for processing and displaying the collected image data.
The existing medical endoscope is reusable and expensive. The selling price of one endoscope is up to about 300,000 Chinese yuan. Since it needs to be reused, after being used, each endoscope must undergo a strict and complicated sterilization procedure to avoid cross infection between patients. According to the related sterilization criteria issued by the Ministry of Health, an used endoscope should undergo a cleaning and sterilization process of 6-10 steps which take at least 20 minutes.
The current situation of the medical endoscope industry is that, on the one hand, the endoscope is expensive and the great acquisition cost leads to that the number of equipped endoscopes is greatly limited; on the other hand, the hospital needs to set up a dedicated sterilization chamber and equip it with dedicated sterilization equipments and corresponding operators, which further increases the operating cost of the endoscope, while the required sterilization procedure limits the frequency of reuse, which leads to that the patients need to pay not only the economic cost but also the time cost, and still take the risk of cross infection etc. caused by an imperfect sterilization. Furthermore, the frequent cleaning and sterilization processes will produce large amounts of liquid chemical waste and aggravate the environmental pollution.
For a long time, such a development path has been formed in the medical endoscope field that: the endoscope is expensive, so it needs to be reused, which necessitates it to be sterilized strictly, accordingly, the erosion caused by the sterilization needs to be resisted to extend the service life, which requires better materials and more sophisticated technologies, causing the endoscope to become more expensive. This development path makes the development of the medical endoscope fall into a cycle of high cost and high consumption.
Although the endoscope has been developed from early fiber-optic endoscope to electronic endoscope which collects images based on photosensitive chip, the cycle is not broken yet. But in fact, with the rapid development of electronic technology, the price of the camera etc. as the core elements for image collection has already become very low. For example, the cost of a conventional 300,000 pixels color CMOS camera assembly is only about 10 Chinese yuan.